Why Gamerscore No Longer Means Anything To Me

It's no secret that I am a huge achievement guy. Hell, looking at my gamerscore will tell you as much. But lately I've felt no drive to go for them anymore and I have started wondering why.

The huge reason is the influx of crap indie games that get pumped out with easy achievements on a near weekly basis. Now I'm not saying all indie games are garbage but the majority are and the fact that all of them have 1000 gamerscore, and most the time they are easy to try and boost sales, means that if you want to keep up with all the easy games and keep your gamerscore rising you will end up playing nothing but crap and miss out on so many good games.

Obviously it's a choice to do that, and there was a point where I did do that. But lately I've noticed that I just don't enjoy it anymore. It's almost TOO easy to raise your gamerscore now. While there were games in the past that were seriously easy points (Avatar, I'm looking at you!), there wasn't one or more nearly every week. You were lucky to get one a month. So you had plenty of time to play the quality games. Achievement's and gamerscore were more of a time filler. Now the time fillers are the good games!

What used to be a fun balance of grinding a number and playing some genuinely good games has turned into me hating my hobby. When I realised this I had to question why I was doing it. There was no good reason. If I wasn't having fun with my hobby anymore then what was the point? That is the main reason for why I lost the love for doing it. People like to throw around the word "devalued" when they talk about this reason, I don't really agree with that word for one reason: how do you devalue something that already means nothing?

With this in mind I have been able to enjoy some games much more extensively than the I had previously. Before I would simply just get all the achievements and stop. That still applies to some games, since some games don't have much to offer outside of achievements in terms of replayability. But some games, most recently Destiny and Metal Gear Solid V, I have played the crap out of and half the time achievement's aren't even in my mind. I'll pop one here and there and go "oh yeah, those things".

The other reason for losing interest in gamerscore, and to a certain degree achievements, is the shaky servers in which they are reliant on. Fulfilling an achievements requirements nowadays isn't always enough, You have to hope you don't end up with the dreaded "Done... Unlocking" notice that plagues the system. To this day I have still not got my final Trials Fusion achievement (Red Lynx vs the Sword) to unlock, it's been almost 3 months, and what makes that even worse is that is hands down the hardest achievement I have ever accomplished. That achievement has made me realise that I don't need a number to know what I did. I'm proud of myself for pulling it off and that's all I need. If that achievement ever decides to unlock no doubt I will be happy, But I am over being mad about it.

The only thing even remotely driving me anymore is keeping my team alive in the GTASC over on TrueAchievements. but that's only because I don't want to let my team down. After that is over I really don't see myself playing fro achievement's too much and that is sure to save me a lot of money on these overpriced and easy indie games.

I've written in the past about whether or not achievements help or hinder the industry. But on a personal level it has hindered me more than helped me. Especially recently. Sure back in the 360 days I have found some gems like Mini Ninjas or even played a terrible game that was fun in its own way like Shellshock 2. But neither of those things have happened to me since Xbox One came out. It's tough to try and get away from the habit that I have had for the past 6 or so years, but every day I get a little less interested and every day I have a little more fun! I hope one day fun can be brought back into gamerscore somehow, but for now I'm enjoying games the old fashioned way! It's hard to say what I will end up doing down the road though, whether I still have interest in the achievements and gamerscore in the games I am playing is my biggest query. One things for sure though, Xbox One has done a great job at breaking my addiction of achievements.

I have to agree with you on this gamerscore is not what it used to be purely the fact that developers are trying to make them easy just so you buy there piece of crap .I used to love getting gamerscore felt like it was an achievement that u beat such hard games but now it's oh how high is yours then people are like mines more than that so u look at there achievements and they have played all the rubbish games.

Bring back how gamerscore should be so you have to actually try hard to get them so they mean more than completing a load of crap games to boost sales

Totally agree, this has been bothering me for a while now. 100,000 gs isn't what it used to be cause it's so easy to achieve now thanks to all the shovel ware. Last gen it was an impressive thing to see someone with 6 digits nevermind almost 7 stallion 83 almost earned before the end of the gen. Now it's not hard to earn 10k plus in a month on a regular basis if you can stomach the trash games. I think there could be a way to balance this out by implementing completion achievements with different values based on completion difficulty. Maybe a bronze through platinum thing where all these trash Indies would be bronze and the better games on up from there. These would be displayed front and center on your profile so everyone can see if you're hardcore and earned every last point or are you a bottom feeder and have nothing but bronze completions .

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